52 Mead, the curator of fishes at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zo- ology. Dr. Mead had been working in the forefront of marine science and was known as an outstanding researcher. He was about ten years her senior and had three children from a previous marriage. "We had many friends in common-it's a small group, after all -and each of us was already known to the other by reputation," she said. "At that point, Giles had been unmarried for several years, and he was sort of looking for somebody. And I was sort of looking for somebody- No, I wasn't looking for anybody, really. But I was found by somebody, and we began to share this vision of being able to do some exciting, original scientific and exploratory work together." Sylvia and Giles were married in December, 1966, and she soon obtained appointments as a research scholar at the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study and as a research fellow at Harvard's Farlow Herbarium She and her husband found "one of those skinny little row houses on Beacon Hill," and after a few months her children came up from their grandpar- ents' place, in Dunedin, to join them. She and Giles were able to go on several expeditions together, and dur- ing these-and subsequent-absences her parents would almost always be on hand to look after the children. Mean- while, there was a lot of commuting. In 1965, Sylvia was named resident director of the Cape Haze Marine Lab- oratory, in Sarasota, Florida-replac- ing Eugenie Clark, who had become executive director-a post she held through the spring of 1967. "It was a period when I tried to do everything for everybody," she recalled. "It was a great balancing act. But then, it's al- ways been a great balancing act." In addition, it was a period when she was getting involved in some rather star- tling technological experiments. As she was aware, underwater tech- nology had always lagged behind ter- restrial-and, more recently, space- technology. Attempts to dive deep or to sojourn underwater began long ago, but in man's efforts to emulate fish two very tough problems have always plagued designers of equipment: pro- viding a supply of breathable air-or a suitable artificial mIxture of gases- and protecting a diver from the im- mense pressure created by the weight of the water above him. Discussing the situation with me on one occasion, Sylvia expressed her impatience with the fitfulness of progress, noting that the military side of things has always proceeded with some consistency, while the scientific-exploratory side has seldom received much funding in any country. Of course, attempts to dive deep or to remain submerged for extended periods have not always pro- ceeded smoothly and a number of them have resulted in deaths and serious in- juries. But in the early nineteen-sixties J acques- Yves Cousteau supervised the creation of a couple of successful un- derwater habitats, in which people could live for weeks at a time, and from which divers could explore the sur- rounding waters and return at will. Other, similar experiments followed, and in 1968 the Smithsonian Institu- tion sponsored its Man-in-Sea Project, which was a followup of earlier Man- in-Sea Projects, pioneered by Edwin A. Link, the inventor of a widely used flight simulator. The 1968 Man-in-Sea Project in- vol ved several types of underwater ve- hicles and living units, and it also exposed participants to extended peri- ods of saturation diving, which was then fairly new. In saturation diving, a person is exposed to pressure for a period long enough, or at a depth great enough, so that the person's system begins to absorb excess nitrogen from the gas he or she breathes. After about twenty-four hours, a human being's bloodstream will have absorbed all the nitrogen it can, and it will be consid- ered saturated. A diver can live under these conditions for extended periods, but on coming back up special precau- tions must be taken to prevent decom- pression sickness-the bends-which can be crippling or fatal. On returning to the surface after long periods of submersion, a diver may have to spend a week or more inside a decompression chamber. When Sylvia heard about this new project, she immediately ap- plied for it, and after several weeks she was accepted. In February, 1968, she .. ..... _. .. _ ---r- _ -: _ '. 'L: s T JULY 3, 1989 joined a team of scientists in the Baha- mas and descended in a vehicle called Deep Diver, which Link had desIgned and which was the first modern sub- mersible with a lockout chamber, per- mitting divers to leave and return to the vehicle underwater. When Deep Di ver descended to a hundred feet, Sylvia became the first woman scientist to lock out of a submersible. She set another record, too, since she was four months pregnant at the time. She had consulted doctors beforehand and had been told to expect no difficulties with the pregnancy. She had none, and her daughter Gale was born the following July. However, the Man-in-Sea Project paled beside Sylvia's next adventure. In the winter of 1969, a project called Tektite-sponsored jointly by the Navy, the Department of the Interior, and NASA-had got under way off St. John, in the United States Virgin Is- lands. The project involved successive teams of scientists living in an under- water habitat fifty feet down. Tektite was named after a glassy meteorite that is often found on the ocean floor, and one of its goals was to study people's ability to live and work underwater for weeks at a stretch. When Sylvia found out that there was to be another such project- Tektite II-she resolved to become part of it, and her effort to do so resulted in a not very surprising con- tretemps. "Nobody else who applied for the project had as much diving experience as I did-more than a thou- sand hours underwater at the time," she said. "And I also had designed a good proj ect around studying the fish and the plants of the area, together with ichthyologists, in an ecologically compatible exercise. I knew I had a good chance. And when I was ac- cepted I was just delighted. But then I learned that there was a catch. It seems the review committee in Washington hadn't expected any women to apply. But when women d'ld apply, and had credentials as good as-if not better than-most of the men, they almost couldn't say no. But there were still some remarkably prudish attitudes in Washington in those days, and the people in charge just couldn't cope with the idea of men and women living together underwater." Washington, ingenious as ever, cre- ated a special women's team, with Syl- via as its leader. Tektite II's Mission 6 -the all-female one-took place in